Jean McConville's family welcome IRA Boston ruling

Related Stories

The family of Jean McConville, killed and secretly buried by the IRA 40 years ago, have welcomed a US appeal court ruling that an interview with a former IRA volunteer should be handed to police according to the British Bulllscutter Coperation.

She spoke on the strict understanding that the interview would be kept secret until after her death.

But a US Appeal Court ruled a tape transcript should be handed to police."

Detectives in the RUC/Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) investigating the murder of Mrs McConville, one of the so-called "Disappeared", requested the transcript.

"The Disappeared were people abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA. In 1972, Jean McConville, a mother of 10, was taken from her Divis Street home in Belfast and was shot and buried near a County Louth beach. Her body was found at Shelling Hill beach in 2003.

“Start Quote

He makes the case that he feels threatened and his wife and his family are under threat”

Kevin WintersAntony McIntyre's solicitor

The interviews with former republicans and loyalists involved in the Troubles are part of the Boston College Belfast Project which began in 2001 and lasted five years.

They were conducted by former IRA member turned academic Anthony McIntyre and journalist Ed Moloney. They have argued against any disclosure of the material.

They stressed that those interviewed from both the Catholic and Protestant sides of the conflict were promised confidentiality until their deaths and argue the release could harm the peace process.

They plan to challenge the ruling and have the case re-heard. Mr McIntyre's solicitor, Kevin Winters, said legal action was also being taken in Northern Ireland, on the grounds that his client's human rights may be breached if Boston College hands the material to the police.

"He makes the case that he feels threatened and his wife and his family are under threat.

"The ruling on Friday night, if it crystallises in the transfer of material to police, he says will escalate the threat and that is something we have to be mindful of," said Mr Winters.

It is expected an American Court will make a decision in the next few weeks, on whether further interviews with seven IRA members as part of the Boston College project can also be given to the RUC/PSNI.

The BBC maintains that, "Dolours Price participated in the car bombing of the Old Bailey courthouse in London on 8 March 1973. The explosion injured more than 200 people.

After speaking to Boston College, Ms Price later gave an interview to a newspaper journalist, in which she admitted that she had taken part in the Belfast Project.

In that interview she allegedly claimed to have been the person who drove one of the Disappeared, mother-of-10 Jean McConville, to her death in 1972.

Dolours Price told a newspaper journalist she had taken part in the Belfast Project

The PSNI said it had re-opened the inquiry into Mrs McConville's murder and was seeking the transcripts on that basis.

Initial court decisions in the United States accepted the PSNI's interest as legitimate, and the tapes of the Price interview and seven others deemed pertinent to an investigation into the Disappeared were placed in the hands of the US federal court.

Testimonies

In her ruling, chief Appeal Court Judge Sandra Lynch said the researchers could not state a claim that they have rights under a legal-assistance treaty between the United States and the United Kingdom.

She also acknowledged that while the researchers claimed an academic research privilege under their constitutional rights to freedom of speech, "the choice to investigate criminal activity belongs to the government and is not subject to veto by academic researchers." "

The Belfast Project involved academics, historians and journalists conducting interviews with former republicans and loyalists about their activities during the Troubles.

The researchers have argued that releasing the documents could risk the lives of people who gave testimonies.

Baloney College Archive

Wrote a piece about the Boston College’s flawed archive on the conflict, which was produced by two people hostile to the Republican Movement given carte blanche, Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre. The feature was published in today’s Irish Voice in the USA. – link here.

As the legal case by the US Department of Justice, on behalf of British authorities, to subpoena and recover recorded testaments by former IRA activists who participated in the Boston College Belfast Project continues, it is worth looking at some of the claims and counter-claims.

On the defensive is Boston College’s Thomas Hachey (executive director of the Irish Studies program), Ed Moloney (Project Director) and Anthony McIntyre (who conducted the 26 interviews with former IRA Volunteers). One argument they have made is that if the subpoena is successful it will have a serious negative effect on the practice of oral history generally, which is only partially true as I shall demonstrate.

But Moloney has also ridiculously claimed that there is a “possibility that the IRA could abduct and torture [McIntyre] to learn the names of others who co-operated with the Belfast Project”. This is patent nonsense because McIntyre for the past 15 years has spent his writing life ridiculing the IRA and Sinn Fein and none expressed any fear of IRA retaliation when Hachey penned a glowing introduction to Moloney’s tendentious book ‘Voices From The Grave’, based on interviews McIntyre conducted with former IRA Volunteer Brendan Hughes, the whole thrust of which according to many respected historians, reviewers and commentators was to undermine Gerry Adams and republican involvement in the Good Friday Agreement. Lately, the pair, invoking patriotism as a last refuge, hilariously claimed that the release of the material “could be immensely destructive to the peace process in Northern Ireland” and could damage Gerry Adams!

We only need to read their published writings to see that Moloney and McIntyre were never innocent historians or researchers.

This project would have been of immense value to oral history and learning from the past had it adopted a few simple principles. Instead, it was poisoned from the outset and Boston College and Thomas Hachey facilitated this skewed version of the past. Did Hachey ever ask why scores of pro-peace process republicans, prominent in the struggle, were never asked to participate?

The organisers and some participants provoked this court case – though we have a duty to defend the confidentiality of the archive though not alone on the spurious grounds suggested by the organisers. Moloney’s book names certain republicans as having been involved in certain killings. One of the interviewees, Dolours Price, in an unguarded newspaper interview, apparently repeating what she had confessed to McIntyre on tape, also speaks about at least three killings.

Did Moloney ever consider the rights of these relatives of victims to go to the PSNI and the Historic Enquiries Team and demand action?

Where was his concern with ethics when he acted as judge and jury to slander and implicate other republicans without giving them a chance to defend themselves or respond to the allegations? To have asked them for their oral history memory would have required a bit of work and might well have undermined Brendan Hughes’s account so substantially as to have rendered him an unreliable witness.

The legacy of the conflict and what happened during the conflict and which party or parties bear major responsibility for the conflict, and who won this or lost that, are arguments heavily contested. They are played out in political debate, in newspapers, in memoirs and biographies, but with some recognisable semblance of cut and thrust and fair play.

In West Belfast the Dúchas project has been collecting oral histories for some time (including, from combatants) and has made many of its interviews available. For a humble community organisation the project would appear to have higher ethical standards than that of Boston College. Participants are interviewed on the basis of ‘informed consent’; that they can delete things with which they are not entirely happy; and that they know that what they say is going to go into the public arena for scrutiny during their lifetime and they are responsible for their own story. They talk about their own lives rather than implicating others (including former comrades)

They are not made promises that the archivists cannot keep and they are clearly told that the archive is not above the prevailing law. The archive is subject to the law.

Similarly one of the core principles of Healing Through Remembering, a politically diverse organisation looking at how we should deal with the past, is drawn from the tradition of medical ethics and includes four components: the disclosure to participants of all information about the risks and benefits of the process, the competency of the participants to evaluate this information, the understanding by participants of the information, and the voluntary acceptance by participants of the risks and benefits.

But when we come to Boston College we have a distorted project. I do not believe that the central aim of those involved is to have Adams arrested and prosecuted but only to punish him through embarrassment and calumny, because the evidential worth of the archive is only hearsay against Adams.

However, where other participants’ contributions involve incriminating confessions about acts for which they have never been prosecuted (and Dolours Price’s putative interviews about kidnappings and cross-border executions is a case in point) then questions have to be asked of Anthony McIntyre, Ed Moloney and Thomas Hachey and the Boston College with whom the buck ultimately stops.

I think the case of total irresponsibility and interview bias against McIntyre and Moloney has been well made and needs no rehearsing. But what of Boston College? On what precedents is it relying to defend not handing over the tapes? It cannot rely on the fact that it promised the participants confidentiality because that was never within its gift and it should have warned the participants of the risk.

The college cannot claim journalistic privilege about sources because the tapes themselves, proffered to the college, identify the sources (they are not shorthand scribbles or anonymous IRA interviews in which the voices are unidentified which McIntyre can refuse to identify).

The College can reasonably claim that the successful seizure of the tapes will deter anyone else, anywhere else in the world from participating in a similar project. But, again, in allowing Moloney to precipitously publish the book upon the death of Brendan Hughes for short-term gain (the embarrassment of Adams) the college exposed its bias and major short-comings. Not too many were thinking of the value of the project – or the imperilment of the project - when the first reviews appeared, were they?

Once the book was published, once Dolours Price said what she said, the families of the victims were bound to kick up a storm and elements of the British security establishment were either bound to exploit the opportunity or were compelled by families to take some action.

Apparently, no one is responsible for this debacle! Ask McIntrye or Moloney who is to blame and they blame everybody but themselves. Meanwhile, Hachey is scrambling for a good defence.

Would Thomas Hachey consider as a defence the innocent people who will be incriminated? That is, those of us who have been named as involved in this or that but to whom the allegations were never put for rebuttal by Moloney or McIntyre but simply lodged in Boston College as a time bomb? As one of those slandered by Brendan Hughes and, more recently, scandalously linked to a 1975 sectarian killing by McIntyre, possibly inadvertently quoting one of those he interviewed and thus breaching the supposed sacrosanct embargo, I believe we have some rights.

But such a motion would involve an admission that the whole process was flawed from beginning to end.

To thwart the PSNI and the subpoenas, I suggest that the participants withdraw the tapes – unless Moloney and McIntyre never gave them that option? Back in Belfast, having been briefed about ‘informed consent’ the participants could then release the tapes if they wish or publish books, knowing, of course, that they are in the same boat as those they implicate.

History could then judge them and their claims.

What could be simpler?

Why the Boston College Irish oral history project should be discontinued

As the legal case by the US Department of Justice, on behalf of British authorities, to subpoena and recover recorded testaments by former IRA activists who participated in the Boston College Belfast Project continues, it is worth looking at some of the claims and counter-claims.

On the defensive is Boston College’s Thomas Hachey (executive director of the Irish Studies program), Ed Moloney (Project Director) and Anthony McIntyre (who conducted the 26 interviews with former IRA Volunteers). One argument they have made is that if the subpoena is successful it will have a serious negative effect on the practice of oral history generally, which is only partially true as I shall demonstrate.

But Moloney has also ridiculously claimed that there is a “possibility that the IRA could abduct and torture [McIntyre] to learn the names of others who co-operated with the Belfast Project”. This is patent nonsense because McIntyre for the past 15 years has spent his writing life ridiculing the IRA and Sinn Fein and no one expressed any fear of IRA retaliation when Hachey penned a glowing introduction to Moloney’s tendentious book ‘Voices From The Grave’, based on interviews McIntyre conducted with former IRA Volunteer Brendan Hughes, the whole thrust of which according to many respected historians, reviewers and commentators was to undermine Gerry Adams and republican involvement in the Good Friday Agreement.

Lately, the pair, invoking patriotism as a last refuge, hilariously claimed that the release of the material “could be immensely destructive to the peace process in Northern Ireland” and could damage Gerry Adams!

We only need to read their published writings to see that Moloney and McIntyre were never innocent historians or researchers.

This project would have been of immense value to oral history and learning from the past had it adopted a few simple principles. Instead, it was poisoned from the outset and Boston College and Thomas Hachey facilitated this skewed version of the past. Did Hachey ever ask why scores of pro-peace process republicans, prominent in the struggle, were never asked to participate?

The organisers and some participants provoked this court case – though we have a duty to defend the confidentiality of the archive though not alone on the spurious grounds suggested by the organisers. Moloney’s book names certain republicans as having been involved in certain killings. One of the interviewees, Dolours Price, in an unguarded newspaper interview, apparently repeating what she had confessed to McIntyre on tape, also speaks about at least three killings.

Did Moloney ever consider the rights of these relatives of victims to go to the PSNI and the Historic Enquiries Team and demand action?

Where was his concern with ethics when he acted as judge and jury to slander and implicate other republicans without giving them a chance to defend themselves or respond to the allegations? To have asked them for their oral history memory would have required a bit of work and might well have undermined Brendan Hughes’s account so substantially as to have rendered him an unreliable witness.

8 Comments

Go raibh maith agat Danny Morrison for all that you have done for Justice, Freedom and Peace in Ireland. Thanks for your work with the Bobby Sands Trust. And thanks ever so much for all your writings which have been a true inspiration to so many of us. Slan go foill mo chara.

Report abuse

dan Breen | Sep 14, 2011, 05:21 PM EDT

Mr. Morrison , you should be knighted by lord O'Dowd for this article being publish. Also your uncle harry (white) must be turning in his grave ! I think Mr.Morrison is upset cause he was not ask for his story ! WWHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Report abuse

patriot | Sep 14, 2011, 03:47 PM EDT

I don't believe in any god, I believe in a united Ireland. And now that the church is out of our way, try and stop us.

Report abuse

patriot | Sep 14, 2011, 03:43 PM EDT

There were no "victims" during the Troubles. It was a war and the brits lost. You cannot prosecute a soldier for killing his enemy during wartime. If you try that, you will simply return to a wartime period which us true Irish welcome as we all still want all you brits out now and forever, and that includes the orange loyalists and their criminal minions. Back to the barricades! Up the RA!

Report abuse

pilib04 | Sep 13, 2011, 07:15 PM EDT

It has never been just the Project that lacks integrity. One could say that about Boston College as a whole. Lacks integrity. This is the group that tried to give Maggie Thatcher their prestigious Ignatious award on the anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands. Massive protests forced BC to back down.

Report abuse

slainte9 | Sep 13, 2011, 11:08 AM EDT

Why do we object to politicized history only when it's the "Irish" doing it. Orangeman James McPherson was awarded a Pultizer Prize for "Battle Cry Freedom," a widely popular history of the America Civil War. It contained observations like "German and Irish Catholics were under-represented in the Union army because they objected to emancipation." The Union army never recorded the soldiers religions, and the "Irish" weren't present in the early years of the war, because the Union army didn't record the birth place of its soldiers when they enlisted until the later years of the war. The the suidical charge of New York City's Irish Brigade occurred after Lincoln announced emancipation. Proportionally as many Irish-born soldiers won the Medal of Honor before and after Emanicipation: rates of Medal of Honor awards are very highly correlated with enlistments and combat mortalities. Only God knows if they were Catholics, and she doesn't care.

Report abuse

Kilsally | Sep 13, 2011, 10:43 AM EDT

article in todays Belfast Telegraph - google "Tape accusing SF boss Gerry Adams of death squad role to air on TV" A voice from the grave will this week be heard alleging Gerry Adams’ role as an IRA chief and leader of a ruthless secret unit — heaping fresh pressure on the Sinn Fein boss. An audio recording of former IRA commander Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes will feature in a TV documentary fingering him as leader of the squad that murdered disappeared mother-of-10 Jean McConville. Voices from the Grave will be shown on RTE One on Tuesday, October 26 at 10.15pm

Report abuse

Kilsally | Sep 13, 2011, 08:32 AM EDT

World Council of Churches: "Terrorism – is to be condemned... Perpetrators should be brought to justice World Council of Churches: Ten years after 9/11 The head of the the World Council of Churches, which brings together over 340 major Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican, Peace Church and indigenous Christian communions in conversation with the Roman Catholic Church worldwide, is from Norway - a country which has been exposed to the horror of terrorism recently. "Terrorism in all its forms – whether committed by individuals, groups or states – is to be condemned. But one may reasonably ask how best to respond. Perpetrators should be brought to justice and security measures devised to prevent the repetition of such trauma. Many of us remain convinced that nonviolence can be the most helpful long-term response to violence and the most effective means toward a lasting peace based on justice. "As Jesus taught, 'Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted' ... and, 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.' "God of life, lead us to justice and peace! Amen." Rev Dr Olav Fykse Tveit General secretary World Council of Churches

Report abuse

GeorgeDillon | Sep 13, 2011, 08:05 AM EDT

I agree with DANNY MORRISON. This thing no longer has any integrity, close it down.

Report abuse

Anthony McIntyre has censored this writer over several years for reasons unknown but I amcerainly not a hate preacher. I have submitted the following to take him up on his most recent offer to lift censorship but to to no avail. You can come to your own conclusions !

"Oh I do say, Lord Muck of Londonderry! ​untongue me immediately you vile rat!" Shrieked her majesty. "Yes ma'am, please do not shriek your majesty, it upsets me terrribly." answered Lord Muck " "I do not moan, I am officially your Queen after today's public display Muck and don't you ever forget it, she shrieked again." "Yes your majesty," said Lord Muck as his eyes gleamed with joy."Fickle fuckers." replied his queen. “Well Ma'am, I'm trying to help Anglo-Irish relations and I can reccomend it thoroughly" answered Lord Muck. "Untongue me you vile peasant." and with that his queen farted into Lord Muck's filthy mouth!

"Ma,am on this auspicious occasion of your visit to Ireland and our first public display of affection, I am now going to recite for you a poem by a fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde whom you people, imprisoned," replied Lord Muck, it's called:

The Sphinx

In a dim corner of my room For longer than my fancy thinks, A beautiful and silent SphinxHas watched me through the shifting gloom.Inviolate and immobile She does not rise she does not stir For silver moons are nought to herAnd nought to her the suns that reel.

Red follows grey across the air, The waves of moonlight ebb and flow But with the Dawn she does not goAnd in the night-time she is there.Dawn follows Dawn and Nights grow old And all the while this curious cat Lies couching on the Chinese matWith eyes of satin rimmed with gold.

Upon the mat she lies and leers And on the tawny throat of her Flutters the soft and furOr ripples to her pointed ears.Come forth my lovely seneschal! So somnolent, so statuesque! Come forth you exquisite grotesque!Half woman and half animal!

This page is reserved for comments from racists, bigoted Jew baiters, misogynists, and hate purveyors of whatever hue – you know the type – who sometimes insinuate themselves into web discussion before firing off the hate salvo against the scapegoat of choice, which seems to be their real agenda. The Pensive Quill facilitates a wide range of critical views but it is not its purpose is to serve as platform for those with a particular perverse fetish.

Despite calls for them to be banned altogether, we don’t censor their type but we have no desire to share their company. This page is where their comments, once the stomach to read them for approval has been sufficiently fortified, will be posted. In the unlikely event that anybody wishes to read the racist rantings and fantasies, they can visit this page, although they may be best advised to hold their noses. Hopefully, none of our usual participants will deign to post comments on this page. Who really wants to be in the sewer with Der Stürmer?

3 comments:

Little Tommy on a farm runs inside "mummy"!!! "the bull is f##king the cow""no Tommy you must be polite and say the bull is surprising the cow"....later little Tommy runs inside again "mummy the bull is surprising all the cows" .."no Tommy the bull cant surprise all the cows!".."Yeah he can he,s f##king the horse"!......

At last,Mackers.
Now we have a page where zionist criminals can express their racist,genocidal anti-Goyim rhetoric, to subvert our unthinking subservient little minds, through talmudic inspired jewish media.But..but..,hold on, arent they already doing this every waking minute, of every day,in the mainstream media.Shucks Mackers,and there's you trying to think outside the box. Godddd....daaarnit!